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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



DYSPEPSIA. 



HOW TO AVOID IT. 



2 Presley Blakistorfs 



BRIGHT'S DISEASE. How Persons Threatened or Afflicted 
with this Disease Ought to Live. By J. F. Edwards, m.d. 16mo, 96 
pages. Cloth. Price 75 cents. 
The author gives, in a readable manner, those instructions in relation 

to Hygiene, Clothing, Eating, Bathing, etc., etc., which, when carried out, 

will prolong the life of those suffering from this disease, and a neglect of 

which costs annually many lives. 

WHAT IS SAID OP IT. 

11 Every one should read this excellent little volume, in which Dr. Ed- 
wards describes and defines the disease." — Providence Journal. 

u This little book is prepared, not in the interest of the doctor, but of the 
sufferer." — Louisville Christian Observer. 

44 A very valuable work."— New York Commercial Advertiser. 

"Plainly written, and ought to be of great use."— Philadelphia Ledger. 

"What should be done and avoided are clearly shown, and the informa- 
tion communicated is of general interest."— A lb any Journal. 

u Plain and straightforward."— Baltimore Sun. 

" An admirable and much needed book." — Catholic Mirror, Baltimore. 

14 A remarkably able and useful treatise upon an obscure and vital sub- 
ject."— North American. 

44 Should be read carefully by every one."— The Voice, Albany, N. Y. 

"It encourages the sufferer as well as instructs him."— Congregationalism 

44 An intelligent work."— Toledo Blade. 

44 A clear statement of some of the rules of life, which will insure the 
longest lease of life, and the greatest measure of health."— Prov. Press. 

44 A satisfactory treatise."— Indianapolis Sentinel. 

"Of especial interest and importance, and should be universally known." 
— Lutheran Observer. 

44 Will be eagerly welcomed by thousands. The malady is one of a pe- 
culiarly insidious character, and it may be asserted with confidence that 
this book will be very valuable for medical men as well as lavmen. It 
is written in good, plain English, and with clearness."— StoddarVs Review. 

44 Simple, practical directions that can be easily obeyed."— Bookseller 
and Stationer. 

44 The considerations presented in this little volume are of the greatest 
moment."— N. E. Journal of Education. 

44 To those for whom it is designed, this manual can hardly fail to be a 
Qod-send."— Buffalo Courier. 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR. JUST READY. 

CONSTIPATION. Plainly Treated and Relieved without the 
Use of Drugs. By Joseph F. Edwards. 16mo. Cloth. Price 75 cents. 



DYSPEPSIA. 



HOW 



TO AVOID IT. 



JOSEPH F. EDWARDS, M.D., 

Author of "How a Person Threatened or Afflicted with 

Bright's Disease Ought to Live," " Constipation, Plainly 

Treated, and Relieved without the Use of Drugs." 



7^A.a.7>J 



PHILADELPHIA: 
PRESLEY BLAKISTON, 

IOI2 WALNUT STREET. 
I88l. 

ON 



y 



V* 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1881, by 

PRESLEY BLAKISTON, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. 



Press of WM. F. FELL & CO., 

1220-1224 Sansom Street. 



PREFACE. 



This seems a strange title for a book. At the first 
glance I dare say many persons would lay it aside, 
not considering it worth perusal, because they would 
feel sure that they knew how to eat, and did not re- 
quire any advice or assistance from the physician to 
guide them in this simple and obvious matter of 
eating. Here they make a grave error. There is a 
right and a wrong way of doing everything. It is 
the ignorance of the right way of doing the simplest 
things that is productive of so much unsuspected 
harm in this world. The more prominent causes of 
mischief and disease are carefully and exhaustively 
discussed and made known to the public, hence, 
forewarned they are forearmed, and much sickness 
is prevented. Numerous works from eminent au- 
thorities minutely discuss the questions of drainage 
and ventilation ; physical and mental development 
have been thoroughly written upon ; the necessity of 
personal cleanliness as an important factor in the 
prevention of disease has been made familiar to 
every one ; yet at the same time, strange as it may 
seem, some of the most important points connected 
with the preservation of health and the promotion 
of longevity have been neglected, because the public 
has been erroneously supposed to be familiar with 
them; whereas, in truth, it is just on these small 
points that the greatest amount of popular ignorance 
v 



VI PREFACE. 

exists. It is not astonishing, when we come to ana- 
lyze the cause, that so much ignorance or misinfor- 
mation on these familiar subjects prevails. When 
we reflect for a few minutes how little the majority 
of human beings know about the structure and duties 
of the various organs which compose their bodies, m 
and as a natural consequence how ignorant they 
must be of the way in which they ought to treat these 
organs, our wonder should be, not that so many 
people are sick, but how it is possible for any one to 
be well. As the twig is bent, so the tree will grow. 
As your children see their parents live, so, in all 
probability, will the)' live, at least until they have 
reached maturity, and are capable of reasoning for 
themselves ; and even then, if the faults in their 
mode of life are not pointed out to them, they cannot 
correct them, and so in turn their ignorance and 
want of knowledge of their own bodies will be 
handed down to and perpetuated in their children. 
This unfortunate state of affairs will continue until 
the science of Physiology, which treats of the duties 
and functions of our various organs, shall have taken 
its place as a portion of the education of our children. 
In the meantime it is the duty of every conscientious 
physician to point out and make generally familiar a 
knowledge of the functions of the various organs of 
the body, so that any one who desires to live as he 
should may learn how to so live ; and may prevent, 
as far as possible, the inroads of disease and prema- 
ture death. Therefore I have chosen for the subject 
of this little book a familiar but not well understood 
function. Many learned works have been written 



PREFACE. Vll 

upon the treatment of dyspepsia or indigestion, or 
imperfect preparation of our food ; but so far as I 
know no one has yet shown to the public how to 
avoid the greatest cause of dyspepsia, namely, im- 
proper eating. If we could collect all the cases of 
dyspepsia in the world, I doubt not that their aggre- 
gate would far outweigh the sum total of all the other 
diseases. And in the majority of cases where the 
dyspepsia is simple and uncomplicated, that is to say, 
is not produced by disease of any organ, but is 
simply a functional derangement, as a result of which 
your food is only partially digested, or its digestion is 
attended with much difficulty and suffering, it will be 
found to be due to defective rules of eating, and a 
reformation of these habits will be followed by 
wonderful relief. If you read this book to the end, 
I am sure you will agree with me that very few 
persons know how to eat, and that fewer still do eat 
as they should. If you will patiently listen to me 
while I tell you "How We Ought to Eat" I can 
promise very much more health and comfort, and 
very much less dyspepsia to mankind in general. 

The tables in the end of this book have been com- 
piled from Dr. Edward Smith's work on "Foods." 

JOSEPH F. EDWARDS. 

Lansdowne, Delaware Co., Pa. t 
May, 1881. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

CHAPTER I. 
Food 9 

CHAPTER II. 
Digestion . 24 

CHAPTER III. 
How to Cook Food 31 

CHAPTER IV. 

How and What We Ought to Eat . . 40 



DYSPEPSIA. 

HOW TO AVOID IT. 



CHAPTER I. 

FOOD. 

In his Unabridged Dictionary, Webster defines 
food as " What is fed upon, that which goes to 
support life by being received within and assimi- 
lated by the organism of an animal or plant." 
Dunglison's Medical Dictionary defines food as 
"Aliment," and Aliment it states to be "Any 
substance which, if introduced into the system, is 
capable of nourishing it and repairing its losses. ' ' 
Dr. Edward Smith, in his standard work on 
"Foods," defines food as " A substance which, 
when introduced into the body, supplies material 
which renews some structure or maintains some 
vital process; and it is distinguished from a 
medicine, in that the latter modifies some vital 

action, but does not supply the material which 
b 9 



10 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

sustains such action." I give you these defini- 
tions of food, because it seems proper that before 
discussing ' i How we ought to eat, ' ' we should 
know something about "what we ought to eat.''' 
For our practical purposes we might define food 
as "substances capable of furnishing the elements 
necessary for the continuance of life, and without 
which life would be impossible." 

All the elaborate and exhaustive works on food 
and diet divide and further subdivide the various 
articles of food into a formidable series of classes, 
based upon their ultimate chemical composition 
and upon the preponderance or minority of some 
one or another of their various elements. While 
this elaborate classification is the result of an im- 
mense amount of research, and is creditable to 
the patience and perseverance of the investigator, 
and does much to advance science, and, through 
scientific interpreters, to enlighten the world at 
large, yet it is not only unnecessary, in a book in- 
tended for popular use, but it absolutely defeats 
the purpose for which the book has been in- 
tended. There are comparatively few, even 
among the more intelligent and educated classes, 
whose minds run in a scientific channel. They 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 11 

have received a good school, and possibly a uni- 
versity, education. Their mental training has 
consisted of grammar, mathematics, history, an- 
cient and modern languages, and the like. Upon 
the completion of their preliminary education, 
the large majority of men choose some business 
pursuit, and as years roll by they not only do not 
advance in the rudiments of scientific knowledge 
which they may have received in early life, but 
they actually forget what they once did know. 
This is perfectly natural ; their minds occupied 
with business pursuits, they have neither time nor 
inclination for scientific study. When such a 
person picks up a book said to be for popular 
use, and finds a thick volume of three or four 
hundred pages, and on turning over the leaves is 
confronted with a startling array of chemical 
symbols and tables, and upon reading a few 
pages finds that it requires the closest concentra- 
tion and application of his mental faculties in 
order that he may understand what he is reading, 
and feeling unequal to further tax his brain after 
the numerous vexations and annoyances of a 
busy day, is it any wonder that the busy mer- 
chant or the exhausted clerk turns away from this 



12 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

dry and ponderous volume to his evening paper 
or a light novel ? and thus valuable knowledge, 
which would prove of great service to him in the 
preservation and enjoyment of health, is denied 
to him, because the author has seen fit to clothe 
his information in scientific and tiresome lan- 
guage. Science is very good and useful in its 
place. Scientific works are most beneficial to 
all, and very interesting reading to some. But 
when a book is intended for popular reading, it 
should be written in popular language, and so 
worded that any one can grasp and understand 
its meaning, and do so with but little mental 
effort. Having digressed long enough to tell 
you how I think a popular work ought to be pre- 
pared, I will now return to my subject, and, en- 
deavoring to practice what I preach, will try to 
tell you how and what a person ought to eat, in 
language which I hope to make intelligible to 
every one. Some few tables and symbols will be 
necessary ; but I will give you very few, and these 
of the simplest kind. If uninteresting, you can 
skip them without losing the thread of the sub- 
ject. 

Nearly everything which grows and has life, be 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 13 

it animal or vegetable, is suited in its composition 
to become a portion of and to sustain the life of 
man. Some articles, of course, contain a larger 
proportion of nutriment than others; hence they 
are preferred. Some are more rapidly and more 
easily digested and converted into nourishment; 
hence are more sought after. The inhabitants of 
some countries will eat and enjoy certain articles 
which in other localities would be considered only 
fit to be given to the lower animals ; so that 
fashion, to a very great extent, rules and regulates 
this matter of food. Some persons will relish 
very much the hind legs of a frog, while others 
will shudder when you mention them, as though 
you had asked them to eat a poisonous snake. 
The student of nature will find most interesting 
matter for reflection in this very question of food 
supply by nature's laws. The beautiful arrange- 
ments, the conservative economy herein displayed 
is most marvelous. The motion of my fingers in 
writing these words causes the using up, I might 
say the destruction, of some particles of the mus- 
cular tissue in my fingers. My eyes look at the 
page as I write, and my mind, through the agency 
of its visible organ, the brain, originates and 



14 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

issues its orders to my ringers to form certain 
letters and words. These acts on the part of my 
eyes and brain entail, as a natural sequence of 
their performance, the disintegration and altera- 
tion of those particles which have been engaged 
in these actions. While writing, my heart is un- 
consciously and without any effort of my will, 
contracting and relaxing some seventy or eighty 
times in a minute. Each time it contracts, cer- 
tain particles of its tissue are so altered in their 
composition as to be no longer suitable to form 
an integral part of this organ. Every act, con- 
scious and unconscious, voluntary and involunta- 
ry, which is performed in our bodies as a part of 
our lives, instantly alters the composition of the 
tissue which has performed such action ; it is dif- 
ferent from what it was but a second before ; and 
from being a most intimate and essential part of 
some organ, it becomes a foreign body, an- in- 
truder, as it were, whose duty being performed, 
must be removed from where it can be no longer 
of any use, and seeking a new field of operations, 
again perform the duty which nature assigns to it 
in its new role. All this dead tissue is removed 
from the body through the agency of organs fur- , 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 15 

nished to us for the purpose. Some of it passes 
into the surrounding air from the lungs and skin. 
Some of it passes from the body in a more solid form, 
and is eventually used as manure to fertilize the 
ground. The proper season comes. The farmer 
covers his ground with manure, the best of which is 
obtained from human excrement, " House Dress- 
ing, " as it is called. He then sows his wheat. If he 
has given plenty of nourishment to his grain, in 
the shape of manure or decomposed human tissue, 
which some time before you have given out from 
your body, it will grow strong and tall. The 
wheat absorbs from the ground, it literally eats, 
digests and assimilates your cast-off tissue. What 
you have rejected the wheat hungers for. In 
another field corn is fed from similar food. In 
course of time, the wheat ripens and is harvested, 
the miller grinds it into flour and the baker makes 
it into bread. At the same time the corn comes 
to maturity, and the stalks and leaves are given 
to the cow, who greedily devours them. A por- 
tion of this corn is transformed in the cow into 
milk, the cream removed from this milk is made 
into butter. Another portion of this corn is 
transformed into muscular tissue, and when in fit 



16 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

condition the cow is slaughtered and cut up for 
the market. Stop and think a minute. When 
you are eating your juicy tenderloin, your white 
bread and delicious butter, and your glass of rich 
milk stands beside you, you are in reality about 
to take back into your bodies those very same 
particles which but a short time before you voided 
in a state of foul rottenness. When finally your 
play or farce of life is ended, your body in mass 
will decompose, and separating into its original 
elements will go through the same process I have 
described, and after furnishing nourishment to 
the vegetable and lower animal world will in turn 
be eaten by human beings ; so that a man may 
some day be eating his own grandfather, and you 
may even have the grim satisfaction of grinding 
your teeth on your respected mother-in-law. After 
all, we are a species of cannibal, are we not ? 
The pleasure of eating their own kind is not con- 
fined to our barbarous brethren, but, as you see, is 
in practice among our most civilized communities. 
Fortunately for our appetites these particles are 
wonderfully changed in their sensible properties 
during the interval which elapses between their 
removal from and their re-introduction into the 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 17 

system. It would require even a greater power of 
imagination than is possessed by Jules Verne, to 
enable one to recognize in the plump and juicy 
quail, or the appetizing sweet bread, any re- 
semblance to the dead skin from your back 
or the dandruff from your head, which you had 
washed away in the bath many months before. 
This is a wonderful and necessary provision of 
nature. If a certain amount of new matefial had 
existed in nature at the beginning of time, and if 
this matter had been continually called on to 
furnish nourishment to man and beast, without 
any source of renewal, it would have been ex- 
hausted ages ago. If all the refuse matter given 
out from our bodies continued to be as foul, un- 
clean and poisonous, as when it was removed, the 
world would long since have been depopulated 
by typhoid fever; while masses of dead and 
decomposed tissue would literally cover the sur- 
face of the globe. Nature, therefore, has wisely 
ordained this rotatory life of atoms. Each par- 
ticle or molecule constantly swings around the 
circle, tarrying a short time at the different speci- 
fied stopping places, performing the duty assigned 
to it, and hurrying on to the next point. Busy 



18 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

atoms, continually working, your labors com- 
menced with the beginning of time and will end 
only when time shall be no more. You set a noble 
example of industry to a large army of lazy men. 
Like the Wandering Jew, these food atoms are 
continually journeying, paying short visits where 
they are welcome, performing their duty and 
hurrying on to the next organism that may re- 
quire them. Unlike Life Insurance Agents and 
Book Canvassers the length of their stay is regu- 
lated with the best of judgment. If they find a 
man busy, they perform their duty silently and 
quickly and depart, leaving room for succeeding 
particles ; if he be lazy and indolent they tarry 
longer and labor less rapidly, because the vital 
changes in an idle man take place much more 
slowly than in one who is active. There is much 
food for reflection in this rotatory life of atoms. 
Premising that matter is indestructible, that what 
seems like destruction is merely a change of con- 
dition \ as for example when you burn coal you 
do not destroy it, you merely alter the combina- 
tion of its elements, they no longer are united to 
form black substances familiar to us, as coal, but 
nevertheless, in the smoke and gases which escape 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 19 

and the ashes which remain we find the very 
same elements whose former combination made 
coal ; chemical change has taken place in the re- 
lation of these elements, they have been separated 
and reunited, so as to form smoke, gases and ashes. 
Premising, I say, that matter is indestructible, and 
realizing that some of the particles which to-day 
form an integral part of your body, may in the 
future be carried over the sea and incorporated 
into the body of some Englishman as yet unborn. 
Bearing in mind that the elements of the food of 
to-day are precisely the same as those which gave 
nourishment to Noah in the Ark, Adam and Eve 
in Eden, and the children of God in the desert, 
can we not, by a process of reasoning, explain 
theoretically, at least (and such profoundly 
psychical phenomena can never be demonstrated 
practically), some of the marvelous occurrences 
which have been deemed accidental and mysteri- 
ous ? Is it too visionary to imagine that some of 
the particles of brain tissue which in the mind of 
Julius Caesar originated and worked out the de- 
tails of military campaigns which resulted in 
making Rome the master of the world may, after 
centuries of wanderings and vegetable life, and 



20 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

residence in minds of inferior calibre — poor pas- 
ture, as it were — finally have been eaten by and 
assimilated into the brain of Napoleon Bonaparte, 
and meeting there with conditions and surround- 
ings like to those of their ancient Roman home, 
planted in good and well manured brain soil, 
they may have grown vigorously, labored with 
some of their ancient energy, and enabled Napo- 
leon, through their agency, to make France mis- 
tress of Europe ? The same seeds, you know, 
will grow differently in different soil. In rich 
and* well manured ground they will produce 
strong and abundant crops, while if planted in 
poor soil they will languish and die. So these 
brain particles may have resided for a time in 
many different brains, but not finding the condi- 
tions necessary for their development, have lain 
dormant, lived an ordinary life, died, and passed 
on to the next organism, until, planted by chance 
in the ever active, rich, vigorous and prolific 
brain soil of Napoleon, they have germinated with 
all the power of their former greatness, and pro- 
duced startling and wonderful crops. May not 
these Napoleonic particles, in turn and time, have 
resided in the brains of, and given power and 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 21 

direction to, the minds of Grant, Hancock, 
McClellan and Meade, of our day ? May not the 
particles which made Virgil the poet of Rome 
in days gone by, in our time reside in the brains 
of and make Longfellow and Whittier the poets 
of America ? Those which made Herodotus the 
famous historian of old may make Bancroft the 
noted historian of to-day. Those from the brain 
of Augustus may have found their way into the 
brains of Lincoln or Washington. In this way 
might be explained the radical and generally 
considered inexplicable changes which sometimes 
occur in the nature and disposition of our friends. 
From being gay, cheerful and happy, they be- 
come sad, depressed and melancholy, without 
any visible external cause to account for the 
change. We sometimes see a man perform some 
wonderful intellectual feat ; unconsciously to him- 
self he has done something great, and the world 
admires and applauds. Stimulated by his unex- 
pected success he essays a second effort, and, to 
his chagrin and mortification, he fails to equal 
his first. May not the brain particles which en- 
abled him to make his first success have lived 
their life, performed their work, died and passed 



22 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

away without leaving their identity on their suc- 
cessors, thus leaving him in a state of mental 
eclipse? May not the same particles of brain 
food which made the poor Corsican Emperor of 
France, in our day have elevated the "tow-path 
boy " to the White House ? You may say, " but 
the life of a particle is short, and the labors of 
the gentlemen you cite have been extended ; how 
could these phenomena have been produced for 
so long a time by such a short-lived agent ? ' ' 
The life of an atom is short, it is true ; that is to 
say, its resident life in the body of man, but when 
one of these powerful and vigorous atoms lives, 
labors for a time, and dies, or is removed, it 
leaves its identity, its impression, upon its suc- 
cessor, and so in turn its good influence is felt as 
long as its visible organ of expression, the brain, 
remains intact. When a great man dies, the 
work which he has done remains behind him ; 
some one takes it up where he has left it off and 
continues it, and his influence is felt (though he 
may be dead and buried) for many years. As 
one great man's work is to the work of the rest 
of mankind, so one vigorous and brilliant brain 
particle may be to the rest of the brain. It may 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 23 

stimulate by example, and so impress by actual 
contact all the other particles or atoms, and all 
new ones as they become part of the brain, as to 
cause them to take on action like unto itself. It 
may seem that I have been dwelling too long 
upon this point in a work devoted to eating. I 
have done so with a purpose. I desire to elevate 
your views on this question of food. Instead of 
regarding the various articles of diet as intended 
merely to gratify the palate, and in a secondary 
sense to nourish your body, I desire to cause you 
to think of food in its aesthetical sense, as it were, 
and ennobling it in your estimation, cause you to 
realize the sublime uses it may be made to sub- 
serve in your body, and thus valuing it as you 
should, you will be much more apt to use it ra- 
tionally and intelligently. 

We now know what food is, and I hope and 
trust your ideas of its uses and purposes have been 
elevated and enlarged. We will turn over a page 
and read a few words about how it becomes pre- 
pared to act as nourishment to the body. 



24 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 



CHAPTER II. 

DIGESTION. 

If you were to introduce bread, the "staff of 
life, ' ' directly into the blood vessels of your body, 
you would receive no nourishment from it. Be- 
cause all food must first undergo a preliminary 

4 

preparation before it is introduced into the body 
proper, in order that it may be altered from its 
condition of crude food in which it is placed on 
your table into a refined state, as it were, in which 
condition it is capable of giving nourishment to 
your body. When the farmer desires to give food 
to his vegetables, in the shape of manure, he does 
not use fresh manure, but seeks for well rotted 
compost. Because the fresh material would not 
yield nourishment, while that which is rotten has 
undergone a species of chemical decomposition, 
by which its original elements have been so 
separated that it is full of nourishment for veget- 
able life. So with your food ; it does not become 
rotten, in the common acceptation of the word, 
but it must undergo a chemical decomposition, a 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 25 

separation of its elements, before it can nourish 
you. This chemico-mechanical decomposition of 
food we understand by " digestion" and it is 
something about this all important function that 
I now propose to tell you. While it requires the 
sum total of the performance of many functions 
to maintain life, yet it may with truth be said 
that digestion is the foundation, the main spring 
which gives power to act to all other functions. 
Without digestion, life would be impossible ; with- 
out the functional activity of the circulatory, 
nervous, and eliminatory systems, life would be 
equally impossible ; but the integrity of these latter 
functions depends primarily upon good digestion, 
by which means power to act is given to these 
organs, from the digested food. To illustrate : 
steam is a power which, when once generated, 
can be conveyed in a hundred directions, and 
utilized for many different purposes ; you all re- 
member the mammoth Corliss engine, which, in 
Machinery Hall, during the Centennial Exhibition, 
originated a steam life which, by means of shaft- 
ing, conveyed the power to move to the numerous 
articles of machinery contained in that enormous 
building. But in order that this power might be 



26 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

generated, it was absolutely necessary, in the first 
instance, that the boiler and furnace should be 
sound, and secondly, that pure coal should be 
furnished to the engine. As a remote result of 
the combustion of coal this steam power was pro- 
duced. So it is with food. As a result of the 
digestion and assimilation of food, vital force or 
power is generated, and, acting upon the various 
organs of the body, produces action in them, the 
combined result of which is human life. In order 
that this vital force may be properly generated 
in sufficient quantity, it is necessary that the di- 
gestive organs be in good condition, and that 
wholesome food be supplied to them. 

Digestion, therefore, is the means by which 
your food is brought into a condition necessary to 
the generation of vital power or life. The diges- 
tive organs are more numerous than you imagine. 
Digestion is commonly supposed to take place in 
the stomach, while in reality, but very little of 
this important function is accomplished in that 
organ. Commencing with the mouth, we have 
the teeth, the mechanical organs of digestion, and 
the salivary glands, which furnish the saliva or 
spittle, a very important agent in chemical diges- 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 27 

tion. Then we have the stomach, in which some 
few articles are entirely digested, but where it 
only commences with most of your food; the 
bowels, in which digestion is completed and from 
which the product is absorbed. The liver, pan- 
creas, and other glandular organs lend a helping 
hand to this process, but their exact position in 
its performance is not definitely settled, and for 
our purposes they can be dismissed with a passing 
notice. Digestion is not confined to man, it is 
common to all life, animal and vegetable. It oc- 
curs in the lowest organisms, and in all plants. 
It is, and at the same time it is not, a mysterious 
process. All life is a mystery. Scientific research 
can explain vital phenomena to a certain point, 
when it is suddenly confronted by an inexplicable 
barrier. We can explain the modus operandi of 
the various functions, tell you the duties of the 
different organs in your body, show you that food 
is capable of giving the power to these organs to 
do their duty, but here we stop; the ultimate how 
or why these phenomena are produced will ever 
remain a mystery ; the origin of the vital spark 
is supernatural. So we can tell you that digestion 
is a mechanical disintegration and a chemical 



28 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

decomposition of food. Let us examine it more 
in detail. When the chemist desires to make a 
solution of any article he first puts it into a mor- 
tar, and with his pestle grinds it into a fine pow- 
der. This he does so that the dissolving liquid 
may come into contact with and thoroughly act 
upon each and every particle, and a complete so- 
lution is the result. This same intimate action 
of the juices of digestion upon all the articles of 
food is necessary in order that they may be con- 
verted into nourishment suitable for your body. 
An essential preliminary to this action is a thor- 
ough disintegration or tearing apa.rt of the articles 
of food. Here comes in the mechanical portion 
of digestion. This duty is performed by the 
teeth. The mouth is the mortar and the teeth 
the pestle, and unless a thorough chewing takes 
place in the mouth, complete digestion in the 
stomach is impossible. On the inside of each 
cheek is a small orifice ; these are the ends 
or openings of small canals, which, if we 
trace them back, we find to have their origin 
in glands situated beneath the skin and below 
the ears. These glands secrete saliva, or spittle, 
which passing through the canals already al- 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 29 

luded to empties into the mouth. This saliva 
is the first digestive juice your food encounters on 
its way to the stomach, and it performs a very 
important part in the function of digestion. By 
its aid starchy articles of food are changed into 
sugar, which constitutes the first stage in the trans- 
formation of such food into blood. If you bolt your 
food, it will not allow sufficient time for the saliva 
to properly act upon it, hence this important part 
of digestion will be improperly performed. Bear 
this in mind ; I shall have more to say about bolt- 
ing further on. From the mouth your food passes 
into your stomach ; there it meets with the gastric 
juice, and prepared for its action, by the grinding 
and salivary solution it has received in the mouth, 
it is further digested. After tarrying a while in 
the stomach, it passes through a small opening, 
called the " Pylorific orifice ," into the bowels. 
Here it meets with new juices \ it here encounters 
the secretions from the liver and pancreas, and 
other glands, and by a chemical process is trans- 
formed into a milky fluid. In this condition it is 
absorbed from the bowels, and emptied into the 
blood vessels ; it becomes part of the blood, and fit 
to nourish your organs and tissues. I have given 



30 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

you a very hasty and superficial description of the 
function of digestion. The important part of this 
little book will be found in the two succeeding 
chapters; but, in order that you may more in- 
telligently understand the rules of eating I shall 
give you, it has seemed to me proper to give you 
a hasty idea of the process of preparation of your 
food, after it has been eaten. 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA, 31 



CHAPTER IIL 

HOW TO COOK FOOD, 

It is popularly supposed that food is cooked 
only in order that it may be rendered more pal- 
atable. This idea is erroneous. The kitchen is a 
chemical laboratory, as it were, in which, by the 
agency of heat, food is so modified and altered 
from the crude condition in which we receive it 
from the animal and vegetable world as to be 
rendered fit to be eaten, digested and assimilated 
into our bodies. The process of cooking has 
been considered of sufficient importance to be 
designated as an art ; hence we have the ' ' culi- 
nary art " which Dunglison defines as " The art 
of preparing meats for the table. In judging of 
the dietetic properties of varioics kinds of aliment, 
the culinary process to which they have been sub- 
mitted will always have to be considered. Many 
of the writers on the ciclinary art have been physi- 
cians. ' ' A few illustrations will make this clearer 
to you. The starch in flour is contained in small 
cells or bags, as it were ; these bags are indigestible, 



32 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

the juices of digestion cannot act on them, and 
if they remain intact their contents as well as 
themselves will pass through the body and be re- 
moved from it, without having given any nour- 
ishment ; you might as well eat so many penknives. 
On the other hand, in the process of making 
bread, biscuits and so on, the heat employed ex- 
pands and finally ruptures these bags, exposing 
their contents to the action of the juices, and they 
are digested. Again, well boiled and thoroughly 
mashed potatoes are more digestible than those 
imperfectly prepared, for the same reason. Apro- 
pos of this mashing or grinding, I can clearly il- 
lustrate to any of my readers who have much to 
do with horses the insolubility of this bag, or shell, 
or cell, within which resides the true nutritive prop- 
erties of the grain. If you have an old horse 
whose teeth are poor and who consequently cannot 
thoroughly grind his oats, and if you do not previ- 
ously bruise them before allowing him to eat, you 
can notice in the evacuations from his bowels many 
grains of oats, whole and entire, as complete as 
when they came from the store. The previous 
bruising would be to the oats what cooking would 
be to the wheat, it would break this hard and in- 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 33 

soluble shell and allow the gastric juices to digest 
the contents. During the encampment of our Na- 
tional Guard in Fairmount Park, last summer, one 
of the articles of diet furnished to the regiment with 
which I was connected was corn. The facilities 
for cooking in camp are always more or less im- 
perfect ; hence our soldiers received their corn in 
only a partially prepared condition. Soldiers 
are human, and, like their citizen brethren, bolt 
their food. The little cells or bags containing 
the nutrition of the corn were not ruptured by 
the heat in cooking, neither were they broken by 
the teeth in chewing. See the result. Each 
morning, as I made my rounds to examine into 
the sanitary condition of the camp, when I 
reached the sinks or privies I was struck by the 
large accumulation of whole grains of corn, just 
as they had come from the cob, to be found 
therein. They had passed through our men and 
had been voided without furnishing one iota of 
nourishment; and still further, this enveloping 
cell or bag, being irritating, had so impressed the 
delicate lining membrane of the bowels in some 
cases as to produce diarrhoea. So much for the 
most prominent productions of the vegetable 



34 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

world. Let us see what cooking does for meat. 
Dr. Edward Smith (already quoted) says : " The 
object of cooking is to render the flesh more sub- 
missive to mastication and digestion." How 
does it do this? The same author says : "The 
anatomical composition of flesh is very similar in 
every kind of creature, whether it be the muscle 
of the ox or the fly ; that is to say, there are cer- 
tain tubes which are filled with minute parts or 
elements, and the adhesion of the tubes together 
makes up the substance of the flesh. This may 
be represented grossly by imagining the finger of 
a glove to be called the sarcolemma, and so 
small as not to be apparent to the naked eye, but 
filled with nuclei and the juices peculiar to each 
animal. Hundreds of such fingers attached to- 
gether would represent a bundle of muscular 
fibres." Again he says : " The quality of meat 
consists in the character of the pulp, or enclosed 
substance, while the toughness depends chiefly 
upon the tubes and the structures which bind them 
and other parts together." Among the juices 
found in the glove finger of meat stands promi- 
nently albumen, the nitrogenized (rich in nitro- 
gen), the nutritious element of meat, which 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 35 

is familiar to every one as the white of egg, 
which is albumen. When you cook meat 
the heat causes the fibres to shrink and sepa- 
rate from each other \ hence the meat be- 
comes more tender, and is easier of digestion. 
There is more sense than one would at first im- 
agine in the old story of the boarding house 
woman, who was accustomed to beat and pound 
her leathery beefsteaks before presenting them to 
her boarders ; by so doing, she bruised and tore 
the sarcolemma, or glove finger, and thus allowed 
the gastric juices easy access to the nutritive fluids 
contained therein. To explain more fully the 
effects of cooking on meat, let me quote in ex- 
tenso from the work of Dr. Edward Smith, on 
"Foods" already mentioned. He says, " The 
degree in which extraction of the juices takes 
place in cooking meat depends upon the heat em- 
ployed, so that the proper application of heat is a 
fundamental question in cookery. It has been 
intimated that the extraction of the juices is 
chiefly from the cut ends of the soft fibres ' (or 
glove finger), ' and that the fibres become harder 
by the coagulation of the albumen during the 
process of cooking. When, therefore, the fibres 



36 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

have become hardened, they have lost some of 
their contents, but this condition prevents, or re- 
tards, the further passage of juices from parts be- 
yond the hardened ends. The sooner, therefore, 
the hardening process can be effected, the sooner 
will the loss of juices be diminished, or prevented. 
Dipping the meat to be boiled into boiling water 
effects this object, for albumen coagulates at a 
temperature much below that of the boiling point 
of water ; and placing the meat to be roasted very 
near the fire at first has the same effect. Thus, 
less juices escape (all other parts of the process 
being equal), and the mass of flesh retains its nu- 
tritive elements. This is clearly desirable when 
the flesh only is to be consumed ; but if it be desired 
to make good broth, or beef tea, the opposite 
course must be adopted, and by keeping the 
temperature below 160 the tubes maybe emptied 
to a far greater degree than with a higher tempe- 
rature. Hence, the explanation of the saying, that 
you cannot have good broth and good meat from 
the same piece of flesh. But the preliminary point 
having been settled, the proper mode of cooking 
is clearly not to coagulate the albumen unduly, 
but to make the whole mass of meat soft and 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 37 

tender. A slow fire, or water at a temperature 
of 160 , will suffice to expand the fibres, and 
in some degree to rupture them, while it sepa- 
rates these and other structures and renders the 
whole mass more fitted for mastication and diges- 
tion. To keep meat in boiling water, or to ex- 
pose the joint to continued heat before the fire, is 
to make it hard and to extract a greater propor- 
tion of the juices." I have given you these few 
lines on cooking in order that you may have some 
knowledge of the necessity of this process and 
what it accomplishes. I will not go into detail 
about the art of cooking, because it would be 
not only uninteresting, but absolutely useless. 
Useless because, in our country at least, the ma- 
jority of my readers will make their first acquaint- 
ance with food when it is placed on their tables 
prepared for consumption. The details of this 
preparation are left to the care of a hired domes- 
tic, who, in the majority of cases, does not pos- 
sess the intelligence to understand the principles 
of scientific cooking, even were they laid down 
for her guidance. Therefore, I imagine my 
readers will be more interested in and more ben- 
efited by rules for eating their food after it is 



38 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

prepared, than they will be by (to them dry and 
uninteresting) details for this preparation. To 
the exceptional reader who may desire to eat food 
which has been prepared according to the most 
approved scientific knowledge, I woujd recom- 
mend one of the many standard works on the 
culinary art. To the sick and delicate I would 
advise the perusal of Fothergill and Wood's ex- 
cellent little work on " Food for the Invalid" 
To all ordinary creatures whose stomachs are at 
the mercy of a Bridget or a Jane, I will give the 
homely precept, " See that all your food is thor- 
oughly cooked, but not overdone or burned to a 
crisp" Before proceeding to the important part 
of my work, and telling you "how and what to 
eat" let me enunciate a very important rule in 
cooking, which I have saved for the last, in order 
that I may more strongly impress it upon your 
memory. In the muscular tissue of the hog there 
very often exists certain small microscopic germs 
or cells, which, when introduced into the human 
body, will in some cases develop into the tape 
worm, while in others they may give rise to a 
terrible and disgusting disease called "trichina 
spiralis" characterized by the development of 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 39 

millions of small worms in the muscles throughout 
the body. Considerable excitement has been 
recently created in connection with this diseased 
condition of pork, in consequence of the hasty 
and ill-adyjsed action of the British Vice Consul 
at Philadelphia. Now let me tell you that you 
may eat with impunity a piece of pork which 
is full of these disease germs, if you first take the 
precaution of thoroughly cooking it. The cook- 
ing process will completely destroy the life of 
these germs. Of course it be would better to use 
meat which had none of them, but as to determine 
this would require a microscopical examination, 
which very few of you would be able to make, it 
is only necessary for you to thoroughly cook your 
pork, when you can eat it with as much safety as 
you would a fresh laid egg, 



40 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 



CHAPTER IV. 

HOW AND WHAT WE OUGHT TO EAT. 

Very strict rules in eating, as in everything else 
concerning life, are useless, because by making 
them strict you make them a disagreeable duty, 
against which the human nature in man will re- 
volt, and refusing to watch and count every 
mouthful he eats, as he expresses it, he disregards 
the rules altogether and eats as he chooses ; hence, 
any good that might be derived from a knowledge 
of the subject is counterbalanced by excessive 
rigidity in its promulgation. To avoid this error 
will be my effort ; my rules shall be so simple 
that any one can follow them, and each rule shall 
be supported by reasons. Scientific works on 
Food have been written, and many of them are 
excellent, but the majority of non-professional 
readers will find them dull and uninteresting, be- 
cause they are unintelligible. They contain too 
many scientific and minute statements for popular 
use. I shall tell you what, how and when you 
ought to eat. Dr. Hufeland, in his " Art of Pro- 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 41 

longing Life, ' ' says : " In general we find that 
those men who were not too nice or particular in 
regard to their food, but who lived sparingly, 
attained to the greatest age, and it is an advan- 
tage peculiar to man that he can digest and 
assimilate the most heterogeneous kinds of nourish- 
ment, and is not, like other animals, confined to 
one certain class/ ' There is very little doubt 
that most people eat too much. They eat because 
their meals are prepared for them, and they think 
it would be a shame to waste them. In health, 
the appetite is the voice of the body asking for 
nourishment to repair its waste. This book is 
intended for well people, and not for invalids, 
unless, in the case of the latter, their complaint 
be simply a dyspepsia or indigestion, amenable to 
hygienic conditions and curable without the inter- 
vention of the physician or his drugs. There- 
fore, my readers should pay more regard to this 
feeling of hunger or appetite than they are ac- 
customed to do. If you lead a regular life, per- 
forming about the same amount of labor, mental 
or physical, every day, the amount of waste and 
the consequent necessity for renewal will be uni- 
form, so that this feeling of hunger will manifest 



42 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

itself regularly at the same hours every day. Or- 
dinary common sense will tell you that the more 
active your life, the more work you perform, the 
greater will be the destruction of tissue and the 
necessity for food. In this connection, I must 
condemn a custom very common among Ameri- 
cans. Our merchants, busy during the week, ex- 
pending a large amount of vital force, and con- 
suming large quantities of tissue, have only time 
for a hurried lunch or dinner, which they do not 
thoroughly digest. Their stomachs are heavily 
taxed to digest this only partially chewed and 
in many cases imperfectly cooked food. Sunday 
comes, and with it a day of rest from business ; 
but it also brings an exhausted stomach, from a 
week's warfare with restaurant diet. The busy 
merchant lies in bed late, lolls all morning over 
his paper and cigar, and at midday actually stuffs 
himself with good home-cooked food, and sleeps 
nearly or quite all of the afternoon. Stop and 
reflect. On the least busy day, when the de- 
struction of tissue and the demands on the 
vital force are at the minimum, the food ingested 
is at the maximum, and the exhausted stomach 
unable to digest it, and the torpid and inactive 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 43 

body not requiring it, dyspepsia results. You 
should eat by clock work, the hours for meals 
should be regular and exact, and should not vary 
from day to day. 

In the Philadelphia Times, of November nth, 
1880, there appeared an article, headed "Do we 
eat too much ?" It was taken from the London 
Spectator, and I give it here in full. " Nothing 
consumes the general wealth of the world like the 
feeding of its populations, and it is by no means 
yet completely settled that the majority of men, 
once above the imperative restrictions of poverty, 
do not eat a good deal too much. An idea has 
been very generally spread that it is healthy to 
eat often, till certain classes, more especially ser- 
vants, eat five times a day ; and the end of the 
medical aphorism, that those who eat often should 
eat little, is very often forgotten. The Lancet, 
of September 4th, in a curiously cautious article, 
hints that the modern world eats too much in 
positive bulk of food — a statement certainly true 
of great bread eaters, a distinct and well-marked 
type — and thinks the modern regularity of meals 
has induced us to regard appetite as the guide 
rather than hunger, which is the true one. Regu- 



44 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

larity of meals develops appetite, not hunger. 
We rather question the previous proposition, as a 
very hungry man is apt to eat too much, but we 
believe that the extension of wealth and the ex- 
treme public ignorance upon the subject tend to 
foster a habit of taking too many meals. Men 
and women eat three in ten hours and a half — 
breakfast at 10 a.m., lunch at 1.30 p.m., and din- 
ner at 7.30 p.m., a division of the twenty-four 
hours of the day which can hardly be healthy. 
It leaves thirteen hours and a half without food, 
while in the remaining ten and a half there are 
three meals. It would be better, we imagine, for 
sedentary men to reduce theirs to two, taken at 
considerable intervals ; or, if that is too worrying, 
to confine the intercallary meal to the merest 
mouthful, taken without sitting down and with 
no provision to tempt the appetite. Lunch for 
those who work with the brain is the destruction 
of laboriousness, and for those who work with the 
hands is the least useful of the meals. It is very 
doubtful whether the powerfully built races of 
upper India, who eat only twice a day — at 10 
a.m. and 10 p.m. — are not in the right, exactly 
equalizing as they do the periods of abstinence, 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 45 

though it is difficult to decide from the example 
of hereditary teetotal vegetarians, the bulk of 
whose food is out of all proportion to its nourish- 
ment. The great evil to be removed is, however, 
not so much the midday meal as the profound 
ignorance, even of educated men, as to the quantity 
of food indispensable to health, and the quantity 
most beneficial to it. On the first subject most 
men know nothing, or at best, only the amount 
of a convict's rations, which is fixed at the stand- 
ard found most conducive to severe labor in con- 
finement, and is no rule for ordinary mankind. 
Cannot the doctors tell us some handy rule of 
thumb about this. They have told us that the 
beneficial quantity of alcohol is the equivalent of 
a pint of ordinary claret a day, but what is the 
beneficial quantity of food. It must differ accord- 
ing to diet, physique, and occupation; but still 
there must be some formula which will convey in 
intelligible fashion the average maximum required 
by men of different weights. We believe most 
men would be surprised to find how very low it is, 
and how very much they exceed it, especially in 
the consumption of meat. Vegetarianism, which 
some among us exalt as a panacea, has been tried 



46 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

for thousands of years, by millions of people, and 
has on the whole failed, the flesh-eating people 
out-fighting, out-working, and out-thinking, the 
eaters of vegetables only; but, between vegeta- 
rianism and the flesh-eating habits of well-to-do 
Englishmen there is a wide distance. Mr. Bant- 
ing, too, wrote wild exaggerations; but the way 
in which Englishmen of reasonable intellectual 
capacities will swallow crumbs of bread, often not 
half baked, by the pound at a time, would account 
even for far severer melancholy than that under 
which they labor. We want an intelligible rule, to 
be obeyed or disobeyed, but to be remembered." 
I intend to give you just such rules, in plain 
language, which a child may understand. When 
I commenced this little book, it was my intention 
to tell you what kinds of food you should eat at 
different seasons of the year, and how much of 
each kind of food should be consumed at a meal, 
in other words, to write you out a bill of fare, 
with weight and dimensions ; but the following 
extract from Dr. W. W. Hall's work on "Dys- 
pepsia" made a radical change in my programme. 
He says : ' ' And he is among the most miserable 
of men who spends a large part of his time in 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 47 

thinking of what he must eat the next meal, or 
who eats according to rule, rather than instinct, 
rather than according to nature; who eats this, 
because it is winter, and he needs carbon, or takes 
that, because it is summer, and hence he must 
discard meats and fats and sweets. They live 
longest in all climes who eat whatever is before 
them, in moderation, and live industriously, either 
as to brain or body, for it is quite as exhaust- 
ing on the reserves of strength to think hard 
as to work hard, and it makes a man quite as 
hungry. ' ' Most works on food and diet will tell 
you how many ounces of each different kind 
of food will be required, under different con- 
ditions, in the twenty-four hours, to support life 
and health. But it can hardly be expected that a 
man will weigh every article he eats, and if he did, 
ten chances to one he would be unable to use ex- 
actly the proper proportions of the various kinds 
of food, while this excessive care and solicitude 
would soon become so irksome, and in many cases 
so utterly impossible, as when eating away from 
home, that he would soon abandon it in disgust. 
Therefore, read and remember the following sim- 
ple rules: — 



48 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

i st. Eat everything, except such articles as your 
own individual experience teaches you disagree 
with you, because the body of man requires a 
variety of nourishment, and could not exist if con- 
fined to one or two articles. Dr. Hufeland says : 
' l In general we find that those men who were not 
too nice or particular in regard to their food, but 
who lived sparingly, attained to the greatest age, ' ' 
and "It is an advantage peculiar to man that he 
can digest and assimilate the most heterogeneous 
kinds of nourishment, and is not, like other ani- 
mals, confined to one certain class." 

2d. Eat slowly and chew all of your food 
thoroughly, until it becomes pulpy and mushy and 
well mixed with saliva, before allowing it to pass 
into the stomach; because this is an absolutely 
necessary preliminary to perfect digestion. To 
do this effectually, you must take only a small 
quantity into your mouth at a time, and put no 
more in until the last instalment has been 
thoroughly chewed and comfortably lodged in 
your stomach. 

3d. Cease eating before your appetite has 
been thoroughly satisfied. Because, though the 
sensation of hunger is, in the first place, the voice 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 49 

of the system demanding food, it does not follow 
that the stomach has not received enough mate- 
rial for the nourishment of the body, until this 
voice of hunger is hushed, for you must remember 
that the food must first be digested before it can 
nourish your body, and that this process will re- 
quire some little time. Therefore, you may have 
enough material in your stomach, and still 
feel hungry, for, not being yet digested and 
taken up, it has not satisfied the wants of 
the body. In view of these facts, a good plan 
will be always to rise from the table with a 
comfortable feeling of satiety, but at the same time 
feeling fully capable of eating and enjoying more 
than you have taken. By eating slowly, you can 
easily determine when you have reached this 
point. For heaven's sake, avoid stuffing. No- 
thing can be more conducive to dyspepsia than 
the habit, so common among our people, of sit- 
ting down to eat and making a business of this 
process. With no intervals between the mouth- 
fuls, they cram, and push, and force, and wash 
down with huge draughts of water or wine, large 
boluses of unchewed food, and never cease until 
they are physically unable to hold any more, un- 



50 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

til they are " chock full." Is it any wonder they 
are obliged to unbutton their vests, and even 
their pantaloons, to make room for their abnorm- 
ally and enormously distended stomachs? They 
grunt and groan, are short of breath, say they 
have eaten too much, and .in a few hours' time 
stuff themselves again. Is it any wonder that 
dyspepsia is so common among a people so hog- 
gish; could it be otherwise? If you stuff an iron 
furnace with coal you will ruin it in a short time ; 
how much sooner will this occur with your deli- 
cate stomach ? Even a horse knows when he has 
had enough, and no amount of persuasion can 
induce him to eat another grain of oats. Let me, 
therefore, again beg of you to have as much sense 
as your horse, and to learn when you have eaten 
enough and to stop there. Do not let your palate 
run away with your intelligence and ruin your 
stomach. So, once more, do not stuff, or you 
will surely have dyspepsia. 

4th. Do not sit down to a meal when overheated, 
over-fatigued, very much excited with anger or 
any other emotion, or very much depressed. Be- 
cause the stomach being unfavorably impressed 
by, and participating in all of these conditions, 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 51 

will be unable to properly perform its duty. 
Under this rule it will be well to say a few words 
about the infernal American habit of restaurant 
eating. A few weeks ago I went with a friend 
into one of the numerous eating houses near Third 
street, patronized chiefly by bankers and brokers. 
To describe accurately the scene there presented I 
am not capable ; but I will tell you some little about 
it. The room was handsomely, even elegantly 
fitted up, the food appeared to be well cooked ; 
but the poor victims ! As I sat eating a sandwich, 
the door would be thrown violently open, and in 
would rush an individual, evidently in a condition 
of great excitement, having, in all probability, 
passed the morning amid the turbulence, and 
worry and anxiety of the board room. His sto- 
mach, I must tell you, was as excited and irritable 
as his brain. He would go first to the tape, to 
see the latest stock quotations ; with the paper in 
his hand he would call out his order for lunch or 
dinner, as the case might be, then to the bar, 
where he swallows a large dose of brandy or whis- 
ky, or the like, then to his lunch, which is swal- 
lowed hastily and with little or no chewing, this 
process being intermitted several times for inspec- 



52 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

tion of the quotations ; he then lights a cigar, 
takes a last look at the tape and hurries out. He 
has been in the restaurant not more than ten or 
fifteen minutes ; he cannot spare any more time, 
for he must get back to the board. Can such a 
meal be properly digested? Your common sense, 
unaided by medical knowledge, will answer this 
question in the negative. There are some excep- 
tions to this rule, of course, but what I have told 
you is the rule among bankers and brokers. The 
business hours for these gentlemen are from ten 
to three. They would have less dyspepsia and 
enjoy better general health if they would eat a 
hearty breakfast, say at nine o'clock, then walk to 
their offices; this would give them an hour, in 
which time digestion would be fairly and firmly 
commenced, before the business and worriment of 
the day began. Eat nothing at midday ; after 
three o'clock walk leisurely and quietly home, 
which would allow time for the day's excitement 
to subside, and bring their stomachs into proper 
condition to receive and digest a leisurely eaten 
and thoroughly masticated dinner at four o'clock. 
Bankers and brokers, try this method. 

5th. Above all things, be REGULAR in your 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA, 53 

habits of eating. Always have your meals at the 
same hour. Take plenty of time to them (at least 
one hour for dinner) and occupy your mind, while 
eating, with light and pleasant conversation. 
Heavy reading or any mental occupation requir- 
ing much brain work, if indulged in while eating 
will be very injurious, because it will have a ten- 
dency to draw the blood from the stomach to the 
brain, and for proper digestion to take place it is 
necessary for the stomach to have plenty of blood. 
The brain is, in reality, the mainspring, the head 
centre of life, and has more influence on your 
various functions than most of you imagine. 

7th. In warm weather avoid oily and fatty articles 
of food. Because they are both unnecessary and 
positively injurious. Unnecessary, because their 
principal duty is to produce heat, and the outside 
temperature being high, you need but a small 
production of internal heat; injurious, because, 
their particles not being consumed in producing 
heat, it becomes the duty of the liver to remove 
the excess of them from the body ; hence, if you 
use such food freely in warm weather, you give 
the liver too much work to do, and it becomes 
exhausted, and eventually diseased. To carry 



54 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

out this rule in an easy way, let me suggest to you 
to reduce or entirely abandon the use of butter 
and gravy in summer. 

8th. Avoid excessive exercise, either mental or 
physical, for twenty minutes or half an hour after 
you have finished a meal, because any exercise 
will tend to draw the blood away from the 
stomach to the organ or parts so exercised, and 
thus interfere with digestion. The " Otium cum 
Dignitatce" the " Dolce far Niente" the after 
di7iner cigar, cup of coffee and light conversa- 
tion, the lolling about, the cojnfortable laziness, 
call it what you may, is a mighty sensible institu- 
tion. Through its agency, during this period of 
passive life, of repose, of quietude, your stomach 
seizes hold of your food and commences vigor- 
ously to digest it. Believing as I do that tobacco 
is a poison, I would still advocate the use of an 
after dinner cigar, if by its potency a man could 
be kept quiet and passive for half an hour ; be- 
cause I believe the injury done to his nervous 
system by the tobacco would be more than 
counterbalanced by the good done to it from the 
more perfect digestion which would result from 
this half hour's repose secured by the agency of 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 55 

the cigar. Do not, however, go to the other 
extreme and fall asleep. If you do, your stomach 
will also " go to sleep" as it were, and your food 
will not be digested. A nap after dinner is a 
very bad institution, and is the cradle of dyspep- 
sia. To repeat, do not go to sleep, hit make your- 
self comfortable, and do not forget that if you eat 
too much it will be impossible to make yourself 
comfortable ; so pay particular attention to rule 
three, 

9th. In such a climate as ours three meals a day 
should be the rule. Breakfast, as soon as dressed 
in the morning, should be rather a substantial 
meal, because it succeeds a long period of fasting. 
Dinner, the meal of the day, should be eaten 
some time between noon and two o'clock; a light 
supper in the evening. Many persons will object 
to a mid-day dinner, because, they say, it makes 
them drowsy and unfit for work. If it does, they 
can rest assured they are eating too much, they 
are gorging themselves. Eat less, and you will 
be equal to a good afternoon's work. I think 
it was the ' i Sage of Chelsea, ' ' Carlyle, himself a 
lifelong sufferer from dyspepsia, who said that 
the surest evidence that one had a good stomach 



56 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

was to be found in the fact that he was ignorant 
that he had a stomach at all. Whether or not 
Carlyle made this statement, it is eminently true; 
a thoroughly sound stomach will digest your food 
without letting you know anything about it, and 
if you are cognizant of the fact that digestion is 
taking place, from any unpleasant sensation about 
the stomach, your digestion is not perfect, and if 
your stomach is sound, your general health good, 
and your appetite large, and yet you feel an un- 
conquerable drowsiness or heaviness after eating, 
depend upon it, you are eating too much; you are 
receiving a warning, your stomach is whistling 
"down brakes" and if you heed not the signal, 
dyspepsia will be the result. I must here criticise 
the article quoted in the early part of this chapter. 
"Men and women eat three ' (meals) ' in ten hours 
and a half, leaving thirteen hours without food, a 
division of the twenty-four hours of the day which 
can hardly be healthy. ' ' Suppose a man takes (as 
he should) his breakfast at seven o'clock, his dinner 
at one and his supper at seven. Suppose he gets up 
at six and retires to bed at ten o'clock, as he should. 
His period of active, waking, working life would 
then be sixteen hours. There would elapse a 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA, 57 

period of six hours between breakfast and dinner, 
and six hours between dinner and supper. Be- 
tween supper and bedtime would elapse three 
hours, and between rising and breakfast one hour ; 
making four in all. When we are asleep all of 
our functions are much diminished in the inten- 
sity of their action, merely acting sufficiently to 
maintain life. So that the sum total of the de- 
struction of tissue (requiring food to repair the 
waste) which occurs during the eight hours of 
sleep would not probably exceed that which 
would occur in two hours of waking, active life, 
when all our functions, intellectual and physical, 
are in full activity* So that from supper at seven 
until breakfast at seven, there would elapse a 
period during which there would take place a 
destruction of tissue equaling in amount that 
which would occur in each of the other intervals 
between meals. Hence, you see, we would have 
in the above regimen an accurate division of the 
twenty-four hours into fasting or inter-meal 
periods of six hours' duration. 

ioth. A golden 07ie. Never eat between meals. 
Because it is absolutely necessary for your stomach 
to have periods of rest and repose f and if you are 



58 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

constantly eating you are also constantly giving 
your stomach work to do, and so robbing it of its 
needed rest. Divide your day into the periods I 
have given you, and do not eat even a cracker 
between meals. Be particularly careful to avoid 
the common and very injurious habit of munching 
candy. 

nth. Supplementary* As a rule, it will be better, 
other things being equal, not to eat when you are 
not hungry. As I have already told you, appe- 
tite is the voice of the body demanding nourish- 
ment, asking repair for its waste. If you are in 
health, and this demand does not exist, it will be 
because your body does not require nourishment, 
it has enough, therefore eating under these cir- 
cumstances would be gorging, and would be 
unwholesome. If you live a regular life, as you 
should, performing the same amount of work each 
day, and sitting down to your meals at the same 
hours, appetite will generally be present. 

1 2th. Do not use artificial appetizers. They are 
the inventions of the Devil, and contain the seeds 
of dyspepsia. The habit of drinking a cocktail to 
produce an appetite is most reprehensible and 
injurious. In the majority of healthy men who 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 59 

resort to the cocktail before breakfast, as an ap- 
petizer, the want of appetite is due to excessive 
indulgence in alcohol the night before. Now, 
this alcohol interferes with the proper tissue 
changes \ much of the dead tissue has been re- 
tained in the body, because the alcohol consumed 
all the oxygen and thus prevented the oxidation 
and removal of this tissue. The whole system is 
oppressed and depressed by the retention in it of 
this useless and decayed material, and in this 
general depression the stomach shares. The 
stomach is also in a state of inflammation, from 
the direct contact of the irritating alcohol. There- 
fore it is not in fit condition to digest a breakfast. 
It is absolutely necessary that it should have rest, 
in order that its inflamed condition may subside, 
just as necessary as it would be to rest an inflamed 
eye. It would, therefore, be better for such a 
man to go without breakfast. If he does eat, his 
stomach will not digest the food ; it will lie heavy 
and undergo putrefactive decomposition, and the 
resultant rotten mass will still further irritate the 
stomach. It would be much better for a man 
who has over night indulged to excess in alcohol 
to drink, upon rising in the morning, a bottle of 



60 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

Congress or some other strong saline mineral 
water ; this will act on his kidneys and bowels, 
and will remove much of the dead tissue \ he 
should then pass the morning in the open air, as 
far as possible ; this will insure to his lungs a full 
supply of oxygen, which will remove from his 
body the poisonous alcohol, and will oxidize and 
remove much of the product of the transforma- 
tion and decay of tissue. By these means the 
load which has oppressed his system will be grad- 
ually and surely removed, and by noon (if he has 
risen early) his body will commence to feel the 
necessity for food, and appetite will appear. He 
should then eat very slowly, carefully, and spar- 
ingly, because his stomach is still very delicate, 
and will require careful nursing for several days, 
in order that it may regain its original vigor. 
Milk, as one of the lightest and most easily di- 
gested foods, will be the most appropriate article 
to commence with. And let me tell you here, 
that it is a mistaken idea to imagine that the 
richer the milk the more nourishment is to be 
found in it. Skimmed milk, as a rule, is decidedly 
more nourishing than cream, because cream 
consists almost entirely of butter, which, in turn, 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 61 

contains little else than carbon, the element use- 
ful in generating heat, but of no nutritive value. 
On the other hand, skimmed milk has had all of this 
carbon removed from it, while it is rich in nitro- 
gen, the element which makes tissue. So that if 
the weather be cold, it may be well to drink un- 
skimmed milk, because you will then receive the 
nutritive element, nitrogen, and, at the same time, 
will supply to your vital furnace fuel, in the shape 
of carbon, wherewith to maintain the temperature 
of your body at its normal standard. But if 
the outside temperature be high, as in summer, 
skimmed milk should be used ; if you use cream 
under these circumstances, and so receive carbon 
into your body, it will not be required to main- 
tain heat, and extra work will be thrown on your 
organs to remove it. In order to give your or- 
gans their requisite rest, no unnecessary labor 
should be imposed upon them. They have 
enough to do in maintaining the ordinary pheno- 
mena of life. 

13th. Do not eat just before going to bed. 
Your stomach is a patient slave and a faithful 
servant. If you impose a task upon it, it will 
use every possible effort to perform its duty. 



62 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

When night comes, your stomach is tired out, and 
exhausted from its long day's work, and wants 
to go to sleep. If you put food into it and order 
the process of digestion to commence, your pa- 
tient stomach makes an effort to obey ; but it is 
so exhausted that it is utterly unable to properly 
do its work, and dyspepsia ensues. Still more, its 
faithful friend and ally, the brain, resents your 
cruel injustice, and as a punishment for your 
indiscretion, tortures you with nightmare, as 
though to say, if you are foolish enough to rob 
your stomach of its needed rest, I will play the 
same game with you, I will disturb, and make 
uncomfortable with hideous dreams, your sleep, 
and see how you like it. Seriously, in the majority 
of cases, nightmare is nature's protest against an 
overloaded and abused stomach, and its warning 
should be heeded. 

In connection with rule two, let me impress 
upon you the necessity of keeping your teeth in 
good condition. If they are not sound you can- 
not thoroughly chew your food. When you lose 
some, by accident or decay, have them replaced at 
once by false ones, or your health will suffer. 
Your teeth are not ajone for ornament, they are 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 63 

intended for use; no portion of the body is simply 
ornamental, every part is also useful. One great 
cause of decayed teeth is drinking cold liquids im- 
mediately after having had some hot article in the 
mouth. The heat expands the enamel covering 
of the teeth, and the cold contracting it suddenly 
causes it to crack, and thus exposing to the action 
of the air the structure of the tooth proper, allows 
it to decay. Another prolific cause is want of 
cleanliness. Particles of food clinging to the 
crevices between the teeth, decompose, and conta- 
minating the teeth cause them to decay. So you 
should always brush your teeth well after eating. 
Do not neglect this easily performed duty ; it will 
not only serve to protect your teeth and keep them 
in good condition, but a nice, clean, sweet mouth 
will have a great influence in making you feel well 
all over, while a mouth full of decayed food will 
give you a bad taste, a foul breath and a rotten 
mouth, which will tend to depress your system and 
make you feel not only impure to yourself, but 
will render you offensive to your companions. 
Many persons who frequently and carefully clean 
their teeth are chagrined and mortified because 
they have a foul breath for which they cannot ac- 



64 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

count. They have forgotten to clean the inside 
of the cheeks, the roof and floor of the mouth and 
the tongue ; the dead particles adhering to these 
parts decay, and render the breath offensive. In 
this connection a very good practice will be to 
use some disinfectant mouth wash. Some young 
ladies are much to be pitied, for, unknown to 
themselves, they are the unfortunate possessors of 
a horribly strong breath. I can recall one par- 
ticular instance of an otherwise very pleasant 
young lady, whose friends are accustomed to 
say " Yes, she is a very nice girl, but she has a bad 
breath, it is unbearable," and they shun her 
society. A new article, called " Bromo-Chlora- 
lum," a pint bottle of which can be bought in any 
drug store for fifty cents, has been highly recom- 
mended in many of our medical journals as a dis- 
infectant and deodorizing mouth wash. Its advo- 
cates claim that while it will thoroughly remove 
any unpleasant odor from the breath, particu- 
larly that of tobacco, it is itself absolutely 
odorless, and will leave no unpleasant smell. Half 
a teaspoonful in a tumbler of water, just as you 
have been in the habit of using myrrh, should be 
used. 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 65 

The most careless and least prudent person must 
admit, if he be honest, that the rules I have given 
you are very simple, and can be easily observed, 
without the slightest inconvenience. I have en- 
deavored to avoid too much nicety, or precision, 
lest my rules should become irksome, and would 
be disregarded and disobeyed. Simple as they 
are, their faithful observance will make dyspepsia 
a stranger to you, and insure you a sound stomach 
and a perfect digestion, with all its resultant and 
dependent blessings of good, sound health. 

What will be the penalty of disregarding them ? 
What will happen if you eat too much ? You will 
have dyspepsia, of course, but the evil will not 
rest here. If your digestion be active, and par- 
ticularly if it be aided by some artificial stimulus, 
as alcohol, spices, etc., it may for a time digest 
all the food with which you supply it. A portion 
of the surplus, over and above what your organs 
require to repair their waste, will be stored up in 
the system in the shape of fat, for future use. 
Some of the surplus will be removed from the 
body by the various organs whose duty it is to re- 
move it. Certain articles, prominent among 
which stands meat, must be removed by the kid- 



66 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

neys. Thus, by eating too much meat, you impose 
an excessive amount of work on these organs, and 
they may resent it. If you eat too much fat, or 
oily food, you will give excessive work to the 
liver, and by excessive combustion in the lungs 
will generate so much heat that your vital power 
will be prematurely burned out, and so on. I 
give you a few instances, because I wish to illus- 
trate all the statements which I make, in a familiar 
and easily understood way, believing that I will, 
by so doing, impress them more strongly on your 
minds. If you are inclined to excessive cor- 
pulency, you will add to your health and comfort 
by taking plenty of exercise, to use up the fat, 
and by eating sparingly of the articles of diet which 
make/tf/, viz : fatty food, and farinaceous articles, 
as potatoes, sugar, and the like. Alcohol has a 
tendency to produce corpulency, because it causes 
the retention of fat in the system, by interfering 
with its combustion and subsequent removal from 
the body. 

I do not intend here to prescribe for the dyspep- 
tic, nor to recommend any medicines for his cure ; 
this duty belongs to the physician. The rules for 
eating which I have given you will prevent its 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 67 

occurrence, and in many cases will cure it with- 
out any medicine. But I will tell you one of 
the great secrets for its cure, when the dyspep- 
sia is simple and uncomplicated ; that is to say, 
when it is entirely due to a want of power 
on the part of the stomach to act properly, and 
is not a symptom or sign of disease of some 
other organ. This secret I will give you by tell- 
ing you an anecdote. Some years ago a very 
rich and very busy merchant of our city became 
a terrible sufferer from dyspepsia. He consulted 
many physicians, who gave him medicine without 
affording any relief. They all advised him to try 
change of scene and habits, to travel, but his in- 
variable answer was that he could not possibly 
leave his business; it required his constant super- 
vision. Indeed, he was so attentive to business 
that his mind was ever on it ; waking, he thought 
of it, and sleeping, he dreamed of it, until I might 
almost say that nearly all the blood in his body 
was in his brain, and his stomach had but little 
to do its work with. Finally, he consulted a 
physician, who, in addition to his medical attain- 
ments, had a thorough knowledge of human na- 
ture. After hearing his patient's complaints in 



68 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

silence, he looked very solemn, and said, "My 
dear sir, you have a very serious disease of the 
stomach \ you can be cured, but neither I nor any 
physician in this city can relieve you. It will 
put you to much trouble and expense, but if you 
are willing to do what I tell you, you will get im- 
mediate relief. " "Why, Doctor," he said, "I 
will do anything ; I will spend any amount of 
money. This trouble makes life a burden to 
me." "Well/' said the doctor, " there lives in 
San Francisco a physician who has made a special 
study of your complaint, and who stands without 
a rival in the world in its treatment. His name 
is Killoch ; his address 298 South street. Go to 
him and he will cure you. ' ' Our dyspeptic friend 
started off. At first his mind was full of business, 
and he was anxious as to the effects of his ab- 
sence. By degrees the thoughts of his prospec- 
tive cure began to occupy his mind, to the exclu- 
sion of business ; he eat and slept better, and so 
he went on. Arrived in San Francisco, he spent 
a week in the vain effort to find the doctor, who 
was the creation of our physician's brain, and 
never existed. Then, his mind full of anger 
against the doctor, who had, as he thought, made 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 69 

a fool of him, he began his homeward journey. A 
week, passed with his mind full of anger instead of 
business, landed him in Philadelphia, a very 7nad, 
but thoroughly well man. Straightway he rushed to 
the doctor's office, and even offered personal 
violence for having been sent, as he said, on a 
fool's errand. " But, my friend," said the doc- 
tor, with a merry twinkle in his eye, "how is 
your dyspepsia ? ' ' The man stopped his torrent 
of abuse, looked surprised, smiled, and holding 
out his hand, said, "why, Doctor, I have never 
even thought of that, I was so angry with you ; 
but I do not suffer at all, I am well." His grati- 
tude knew no bounds \ and he was well. The 
doctor's ruse had effected what all the other phy- 
sicians had been unable to accomplish by their 
advice. It forced this busy man to travel, to 
make a change in all his habits, and to fill his 
mind with other thoughts, and it was successful, 
it cured him. The moral is evident, you can all 
see it. To carry out this moral, I will advise the 
busy dyspeptic merchant of our large cities to let 
his business alone for a few days, and seeking a 
change of scene, eat according to the rules I have 
given ; it will do him more good than drugs. The 



70 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

stomach needs a certain amount of exercise, as 
well as the rest of your body, in order that it may 
possess that degree of health, vigor and strength 
which is a sine qua non of perfect digestion. 
Hence it is that the intellectual portion of man- 
kind are particularly prone to suffer from dyspep- 
sia. Their lives are, from their occupation, sed- 
entary, their vocation calls for but little exercise 
save that of the mind, and, as a natural result, 
their stomachs become torpid and act imperfectly ; 
on this account, literary men, lawyers and judges 
and the like, should be scrupulously careful to 
insure to their bodies a sufficiency of exercise. 
Dyspepsia is almost unknown among the laboring 
classes. Their appetite is good, they digest and 
sleep well, and consequently enjoy good health. 
Their occupation is active, it ensures them a 
sufficiency of exercise in the open air, and of ne- 
cessity, a sound and perfect stomach. Abernethy's 
blunt advice to the rich, overfed, indolent and 
gouty London dyspeptic, to (€ live on a shil- 
ling a day and earn it" has become proverbial, 
and is certainly a golden maxim. The Almighty 
Creator's injunction to man, that he should earn 
his bread by the sweat of his brow, contained, as^ 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 71 

all His supernaturally wise directions did, divine 
knowledge. By following it faithfully dyspepsia 
will be a stranger. Imperfect digestion is, par 
excellence, the affliction of the rich and lazy. It 
is marvelous to enter the home of the poor work- 
ing man at dinner time and see with what relish 
he will eat enormous quantities of tough and 
poorly prepared meat and feel no ill effects from 
it. 

A few words on "water" will here be in place. 
I imagine my readers have not hitherto considered 
water as an article of food ; nevertheless it is such, 
and a very important article it is. Dr. Smith 
says, "It is needless to insist that water is a most 
important food, for it is found in all foods, 
whether solid, liquid, or gaseous, and is taken 
into the body to the amount of several pints daily. 
It, moreover, constitutes about 87 per cent, of 
the whole bulk of the body, and as it wastes at 
every moment, it must be restored by a new sup- 
ply. It is required for many purposes : first, to 
soften or dissolve solid foods, so as to facilitate 
their mastication and digestion ; second, to main- 
tain a due bulk of blood and the structures of the 
body; third, to keep substances in solution or 



72 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

suspension while moving in the body ; fourth, to 
supply elements in the chemical changes of the 
body; fifth, to enable the waste material to be 
carried away from the body \ sixth, to discharge 
superfluous heat by transpiration through the skin, 
and by emissions through other outlets, and 
seventh, to supply, in a convenient form, heat to, 
or to abstract heat from, the body. ' ' So, you see, 
water is really a most important article of food. 
Dr. Smith devotes many pages of his work to the 
discussion of the composition of water, and the 
many impurities to be found in it. Were I to tell 
you about them, it would be time wasted, as you 
would not care to take the trouble to make 
the necessary examinations to detect these im- 
purities. Therefore I will simply say that every 
person who can afford to buy a filter should use 
filtered water, not only for drinking, but also for 
cooking purposes. Unless the water be very foul 
and impure, this filtering process will purify it 
sufficiently to make its use harmless. It is im- 
portant that you should know that taste and smell 
are not good evidences of purity or impurity of 
water. It may taste pure and have no bad odor, 
and yet it may be unwholesome. Therefore, in 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 73 

choosing a new dwelling, if you desire to use all 
possible precautions against the introduction of 
disease, you should not be content with a super- 
ficial examination of the water supply, the prox- 
imity of drain pipes to the water pipes and the 
possible danger of contamination from them, but 
you should have a specimen of the water analyzed 
chemically. Bad drainage and foul water, I 
doubt not, are the two most prominent and in- 
sidious avenues for the entrance of unsuspected 
disease to your homes and families, and they 
should receive more attention than is accorded 
to them. Should you feel unwell, should your 
children be less robust than visible surrounding 
circumstances would account for, if they receive a 
sufficiency of wholesome food, if the drainage, 
upon careful examination, is found perfect, if the 
location is healthy, if you have a sufficiency of 
pure air, if, in a word, you cannot otherwise satis- 
factorily account for their want of vigor ; remem- 
ber what I have told you about the unreliability of 
the sense of smell or taste in detecting impure water, 
and have an analysis made at once. Your family 
may have been introducing the seeds of disease 

F 



74 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

into their bodies through the agency of apparently 
pure and wholesome water. 

Tea and Coffee. — Two thoroughly discussed 
articles. Therefore, I will say little about them. 
They each have their advocates and their oppo- 
nents, just as alcohol and tobacco have. They 
are unnecessary, their use is not requisite to the 
maintenance of life or health, they are luxuries, 
just as alcohol and tobacco are. I once asked 
Dr. Smith, of Delaware County, in this State, a 
vigorous, active gentleman of seventy-eight years, 
whether he considered tea and coffee injurious ; 
his answer was, " not as I use them; I use a small 
cup of very weak coffee in the morning, and the 
same kind of a cup of tea in the evening ; if they 
are used in large amounts and strong, I believe 
them to be injurious/ ' In correspondence with 
a large number of intelligent gentlemen, all over 
eighty years of age, I have received the almost 
universal response, that they have used tea and 
coffee in about the same way that I have told you 
Dr. Smith uses it, throughout their lives, and that 
they do not consider it injurious when so used. 
To give you, in a nutshell, some information of 
value about these two articles, I will quote Dr. 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 75 

Edward Smith, who says, in his work on " Foods, ' ' 
" Hence, in reference to nutrition, we may say 
that tea increases waste, since it promotes the 
transformation of food without supplying nutri- 
ment, and increases the loss of heat without sup- 
plying fuel, and it is, therefore, especially adapted 
to the wants of those who usually eat too much, 
and after a full meal, when the process of assimi- 
lation should be quickened, but is less adapted to 
the poor and ill-fed, and during fasting. To take 
tea before a meal is as absurd as not to take it 
after a meal, unless the system be at all times re- 
plete with nutritive material ; and the fashion of 
the day" (in England), " of taking tea at about 
five o'clock, can only be defended when there has 
been a hearty lunch at one or two o'clock, and 
an anticipated dinner or supper at seven or eight 

o'clock. For those to take tea before dinner who 

• 

eat little or no lunch, must be so far injurious and 
tend to promote irritability of the stomach." 
Again, "it may, also, be added that, while tea 
promotes assimilation, there is no ground for be- 
lieving that it promotes the digestion of food in 
healthy persons, and, therefore, it is not usual to 
take it with, but after a principal meal." I have 



76 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

myself seen several cases of windy dyspepsia, in 
persons who used tea very freely, entirely disap- 
pear without any medicine and with no other 
change in diet or mode of life, upon giving up 
the use of tea. 

Of coffee, Dr. Smith says, " The conditions, 
therefore, under which coffee may be taken are 
very different from those suited to tea. It is more 
fitted than tea for the poor and feeble. It is also 
more fitted for breakfast, inasmuch as the skin is 
then active and the heart's action feeble; while 
in good health and with sufficient food it is not 
needful after dinner, but if then drank should be 
taken soon after the meal." 

As a matter of interest, rather than of any 
practical value, I will now give you a few tables. 
Some of my readers may use them as guides in 
eating, and will be benefited by doing so ; but I 
imagine most of my readers will consider it too 
hard work to derive any good from them. 
TABLE NO. i. 

TIME OCCUPIED IN DIGESTING. 

Tripe i hour. 

Pig's feet I " 

Boiled rice little over i " 

Barley 2 " 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 77 

Lamb 2^ hour. 

Sucking pig • 2^ 

Bacon 2^ 

Venison 2]/ 2 to 2^ 

Cream cheese 2 to 3 

Potatoes 2^ to 3^ 

Parsnips and carrots 2^ to 3^ 

Beans, boiled 2^ 

Beef. 2^ to 3 

Young pickled pork 3 

Cabbage and salads 2^ to 4 

Sago i# 

Arrowroot 1^. 

Mutton 3 to 3% 

Good cheese 3^ to 4 

Bread y/ 2 to 4 

Indian corn cake or bread 3 to 3^ 

Eggs 3 to 4 

Beets 3^ 

Veal 4 to 5 

Roast pork 5^ 

TABLE NO. 2. 

SHOWING RELATIVE PROPORTIONS OF NITROGEN AND 
CARBON IN THE MOST PROMINENT ARTICLES OF FOOD. 

Carbon. Nitrogen. 

Grains per lb. Grains per lb. 

Roast beef. 3600 262 

Boiled beef 3240 215 

If juice is saved and eaten, add.. 490 18 }4 

Boiled mutton 3175 192 

Fresh pork 4200 79 

Dried bacon 434-0 79 

Ox liver.... 1126 210 



78 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

Carbon. Nitrogeu. 
Grains per lb. Grains per lb. 

Tripe 1190 59^ 

Flour 2656 120 

Ordinary bread 1968 92 

Barley meal 2500 93 

Pearl barley 2656 91 

Rye meal 2660 88 

Potatoes 760 24 

Swede turnips 304 15.3 

White turnips 173 11. 2 

Carrots 384 14 

Beets 350 iyj4 

Cabbage and salads 420 14 

Sago 2555 1% 

Arrowroot 2 555 ° 

Tapioca 2555 o 

Sugar 2800 o 

Cocoa or chocolate 3934 I 4° 

Cheese 2660 315 

Butter 4760 

Suet 4760 

Lard 5320 

Drippings 5320 

Peas 2683 252 

Maize 2800 121. 6 

Oatmeal 2768 140 

Egg (i^f ozs. weight) 120 17^ 

Fresh herring (4^ ozs. weight)... 240 36 

Dried herring (3 ozs. weight) 269 41 

New milk ( 1 pint) 546 43^ 

Good skimmed milk (1 pint) 437 43/4^ 

Buttermilk (1 pint) 420 43^ 

Whey ( 1 pint) 193-2 14.5 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 79 

TABLE No. 3. 

SHOWING PROPORTION OF NITROGEN IN DIFFERENT FRUITS. 

Nitrogen. 

Ripe grapes..... 8 

Mulberries 0.394 

Billberries 0.794 

Blackberries 0.510 

Cherries — sour 2.656 

" rather sour 3.529 

" sweet black 1.680 

" lightred 3-189 

Apples — English rennets 7.92 

" white dessert 2.94 

Sweet red pears..... 4.646 

Banana 4.82 

Strawberries — wild °-5^7 

" cultivated °-359 

Raspberries — wild red °-545 

" cultivated Q-544 

Plums 0.47 

Apricots 0.38 

Peaches 0.46 

Gooseberries 0.35 

Currants — white 0.68 

" very large red „ 0.35 

TABLE No. 4. 

PROPORTION OF NITROGENOUS, OR MUSCLE AND FLESH 
PRODUCING ELEMENTS, AND OF FAT OR HEAT PRO- 
DUCING ELEMENTS IN DIFFERENT KINDS OF MILK. 
Milk of Nitrogenous . Fat. 

Goat 3.51 pr. ct. 5.68 pr. ct. 

Sheep 6.97 " 5.13 " 

Ass 3.56 u 1.85 " 

Cow 5.52 " 3.61 " 

Woman 3.92 " 2.66 " 



80 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 



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HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 81 



COMMENTS. 

Table No. i will enable you to regulate your 
diet according to the time you may be able to 
devote to digestion. 

Table No. 2 will enable the careful eater to 
arrange his bill of fare suitably for the different 
seasons of the year, and according to external 
circumstances. If the weather be warm you want 
food poor in carbon ; if cold, you must freely use 
that which is rich in this element. I will here 
quote from the work of Dr. Edward Smith, already 
referred to, a paragraph which clearly explains the 
production of heat from food. "The production 
of heat in the body, so wonderful in the process 
and amount, results only from the chemical com- 
bination of the elements of food, whether on the 
minute scale of the atoms of the several tissues, 
or on the larger one connected with respiration, 
and is thence called the combustion of food. 
As familiar illustrations of the production of 
heat from chemical change, we may mention 
that when cold oil of vitriol and cold water are 
added together, the mixture becomes so hot that 



82 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

the hand cannot bear it, and the heating of hay 
stacks, and also of barley in the process of 
malting, is well known. This action in the 
body is not restricted to changes in one element 
alone, but proceeds with all ; yet it is chiefly due 
to a combination of three elements, viz., oxygen, 
hydrogen and carbon, and requires for its support 
fat, starch, or sugar, or other digestible food com- 
posed of those substances precisely as coal and 
wood supply fuel for fire without the body." 
When undergoing much muscular exertion, and 
experiencing a consequent loss or destruction of 
tissue, the body will require nourishment rich in 
nitrogen. In winter the two must be combined. 
If inclined to corpulency, and desire to prevent it, 
avoid fat-producing foods, which are those rich in 
carbon. If inclined to be bilious, avoid also 
fatty food. If of a full, plethoric habit, possessing 
too much blood, avoid nitrogenous food and 
especially meat, or at least use it sparingly. 

Table No. j will tell you the relative propor- 
tions of nitrogenized or flesh producing elements 
in the different kinds of fruit. From it you can 
learn what fruits are most nutritious, and in warm 
summer weather, unless you are performing severe 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 83 

muscular labor, fruit should form the staple articles 
of breakfast and supper. 

Table No. 4. contains very useful information 
for nursing mothers. Cow's milk, you will ob- 
serve, contains a much larger percentage of ni- 
trogen and of fat than woman's milk. There- 
fore it is that the physician advises you to so 
freely dilute cow's milk when giving it to your 
baby in place of woman's milk. In its pure state 
it is too strong and too rich for the delicate 
stomach of the baby, intended to receive and 
digest the much weaker and less rich milk of its 
mother. You may also observe, and take a whole- 
some hint from the fact, that goat's and ass's 
milk approach much more nearly the chemical 
composition of woman's milk than that of the cow 
does. 

Table No. 3 will be of especial use to you in 
winter. When on a very cold day in mid-winter 
you are compelled to submit your body to an 
excessively and long continued low temperature, 
consult this table, and use freely those articles 
which will produce the greatest amount of heat. 
Your internal heat production will thus supply the 
abstraction of heat from your body, and do so 



84 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

much more effectually and permanently than al- 
cohol will. 

A FEW NOTES. 

Pork is indigestible on account of difficulty of 
mastication, because of the hardness and tough- 
ness of the fibre. 

The liver of all animals is apt to be infested by 
a parasite which is invisible to the naked eye. 

Sausages decompose rapidly, because they are 
fresh and moist. 

Blood of fowls contains much less iron than 
that of red-blooded animals, but three times as 
much phosphorus. 

Oat meal should be well cooked. 

Groats are the whole kernel of oats when freed 
from the husk. 

Nuts and cheese are indigestible, but aid diges- 
tion of food. 

Chestnuts are much less indigestible than other 
nuts. 

Nuts are much more nutritious than fruit. 

Roast beef is more nutritious in a given bulk 
than boiled meat, but if the juices are collected 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 85 

from boiled meat and eaten, it is more nutritious 
than roast. 

Stewed meat is less nutritious than boiled, and 
more than roast, if the extracted juices are eaten 
with it. 

Veal does not produce as much heat as beef. 

Lamb less nourishing than mutton. 

Goat contains more nitrogen, but less carbon 
than mutton. 

Lentils are more nutritious than peas. 

Starch and sugar are, in the vegetable world, 
what fat is in the animal kingdom, the special 
representatives of non-nitrogenous and heat pro- 
ducing articles of food. 

Young cabbage plants contain the largest pro- 
portion of nitrogen ; the ripe outer leaves are the 
most heat producing. 

Olive oil is one of the most easily digested fats 
in food. 

A given quantity of butter consumed in the 
body will produce ten times as much heat as the 
same quantity of fresh, lean meat. 

Mutton is popularly regarded as a lighter food 
than beef, and it has doubtless a more delicate 



86 HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 

flavor, less red-blood juices, a looser texture, and 
a larger proportion of fat. Although an agree- 
able and valuable food for all classes, it is not so 
well fitted as beef to sustain great exertion, but 
is rather a food for those of sedentary and quiet 
habits, including women and the sick. It is said 
that Kean suited the kind of meat which he ate 
to the part which he was about to play, and 
selected mutton for lovers, beef for murderers, 
and pork for tyrants. (Dr. E. Smith.) 

The nutritive value of eggs cannot be over- 
estimated. 

While mushrooms contain some nourishment, 
yet their use must be indulged in merely as a 
luxury and not as a staple article of diet, since 
they are so poor in nitrogen that it would re- 
quire a daily consumption of seven pounds of 
them in order that your body might receive the 
minimum requisite quantity of this element. 

Bread is in vegetable foods that which flesh is 
in animal foods, and each within itself contains 
nearly all the elements required for nutrition. 

In conclusion, I will merely add, that I hope 
you will remember and follow the rules I have 



HOW TO AVOID DYSPEPSIA. 87 

given you ; do so, and you will have good diges- 
tion ; fail to do so, and you will, as sure as fate, 
have dyspepsia sooner or later. 



SELECT LIST OF BOOKS 

FOR GENERAL AND SCIENTIFIC READERS. 
FROM THE CATALOGUE OP 

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR. JUST READY. 

CONSTIPATION. Plainly Treated and Relieved without the 
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THE MANAGEMENT OF CHILDREN in Health and 
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THE PRESS COMMEND IT AS FOLLOWS! 

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44 Admirable common-sense advice, which mothers would do well to have." 
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41 It should be upon every household table." — Nashville Jour. Med. and Sur. 

BIBLE HYGIENE; or, Health Hints. By a Physician. This 
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are the Health Hints contained in the Bible, and third, to prove that 
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44 The scientific treatment of the subject is quite abreast of the present 
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44 Dr. Wilson is favorably known as one of the leading American writers 

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The Twelve Volumes, in Handsome Cloth Box, $6.00. 

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XII. School and Industrial Hygiene. By D. F. Lincoln, m.d., 
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This series of American Health Primers is prepared to diffuse as widely 
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44 Brain Work and Overwork, by Dr. H. C. Wood, Clinical Professor of 
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44 An unexceptional household library."— Boston Journal of Chemistry. 

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WATER ANALYSIS For Sanitary Purposes, With Hints for 
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WHAT TO DO FIRST in Accidents and Poisoning. By Charles 
W. Dulles, m.d. Illustrated. 18mo. Cloth. Price 50 cents. 

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OPINIONS. 

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EYESIGHT, GOOD AND BAD. The Preservation ofVision. 
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PREFACE. 

A large portion of the time of every ophthalmic surgeon is occupied, day 
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WHAT IS THOUGHT OF IT. 

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HEALTH AND HEALTHY HOMES. A Guide to Personal 
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How your Body is Made. 

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DRUGS THAT ENSLAVE. The Opium, Morphine, Chloral, 
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the first time, reliable statistics on the use of chloral are classified and 
published. . . . And it is shown that the use of chloral causes a more 
complete and rapid ruin of mind and body than either opium or morphine." 
— Druggists 1 Circular and Gazette. 

•• The effects of the habits described are set forth boldly and clearly, and 
the book must have a beneficial effect. It will do still better service in de- 
terring persons from experimenting 'to see what it is like/ "—Charleston 
(S. C.) News and Courier. 

"The subject of the chloral habit has not been investigated by any one, 
we believe, so thoroughly as by Dr. Kane."— Medical Record. 

" There is ground tor a now temperance movement here. The book is a 
valuable one. It is written in a practical manner, and has nothing of a 
sensational character." — Philadelphia Ledger. 

THE OCEAN AS A HEALTH RESORT. A handbook of 
Practical Information as to Sea Voyages, for the use of Tourists and 
Invalids. By War. S. Wilson, l.r.c.p.. Lond , m.r.c.s.e. With a 
Chart showing the Ocean Routes, and Illustrating the Plr sical Geo, 
graphy of the Sea. Crown 8vo. Price $2.50. 
Curative Effects of the Ocean Climate ; The Various Health Voyages ; 
Time of Starting; Choosing a Ship; Preliminary Arrangements; Life at 
Sea; Climate and Weather; Management of the Health at Sea; Occupa- 
tions and Amusements at Sea; Objects of Interest at Sea ; End of the 
Voyage; Future Plans ; The Homeward Voyage; Australia— Its Climate, 
Cities and Health Resorts; South Africa and its Climate; The Meteorol- 
ogy of theOcean Appendix A.— Outfit Required for a Voyasre to Austra- 
lia. Appendix B.— Names and Addresses of some of the Principal Ship- 
ping Firms. 

U A11 the information is supplied by, or based upon, the actual experience 
of the author; and the book may be confidently recommended to all who 
have to undertake, without previous experience, a sea voyage of any 
length. Medical men may consult it with advantage, and commend it to 
those patients whom they may advise to try the effect of a long voyage at 
sea " — Med. Times and Gazette. 

" We have read every page of this book, and have derived both instruc- 
tion and amusement." — Lancet. 



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